While the sale of e-books has risen astronomically, the sale of electronic textbooks at the University Book Store has increased slightly over the past year, said program coordinator Carl Arbuckle. 

“With iPads and tablets becoming extremely popular among students, the sale of e-books has increased 2 to 3 percent at the ISU Book Store in the past year,” Arbuckle said. 

Still, the Book Store is taking steps to stay current with trends in the book-buying industry. Arbuckle said any book that is available in store can also be purchased electronically, and most books also are sold as e-books.

Their website also has a Comparison Shopping tool, where students can select a department, then their course, and once they find the books they need, they can compare prices with amazon.com and halfpricebooks.com. Students can then purchase books from any of these three websites.

“Of all of the students that used these comparisons, 83 percent  of them bought from the ISU Book Store,” Arbuckle said. 

The new big-box bookseller in Ames, Books-A-Million, also offers some textbook options for students. According to the store’s website, “You can order most textbooks and non-academic books online, but there is a limited amount of textbooks that are sold in-store.”

Campus Book Store declined to comment on its book sales for the past year. 

Even with the increase of electronic books across the nation, there are indications that printed books are not “dead,” and this seems to be the case with textbooks. 

“[The] print book is not dead considering sales from 2009-2010 were about the same when the amount of sales from e-books was subtracted,” according to the Association of American Publishers.

The Association recorded 164.4 percent gains in the sale of e-books from 2009-2010.